Things that struck me about Korea

 I admit that this post is a little bit late after its subject, but I wrote notes in all the places I went in Asia this summer, and some of them are just bubbling up now. This is about the things I noticed in South Korea, a country I had never been to, and about which the extent of my knowledge was Kimchi and Gangnam Style. But first impressions are quite important. 

What I love about going to places I've never been is that I end up trying to decode things I see, just in the way that a young child makes sense of the world by observing it. I love the boost that it gives to your curiosity and how good that is for my brain. It doesn't exactly make you a child again, learning how the world works around you, but maybe somewhere deep in your subconscious, it reminds you of that time.

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I believe that the things you notice first about a new place are the things that don't immediately fit into your schema of how the world works (and that schema can even include your preformed beliefs about the place you've never been to!). So when you look and see something that doesn't fit in, your mind makes it more prominent, so that's what stands out. A simple example is when I went to Tokyo for the first time I thought: "why are there so many cables on poles along every street?" because to an English eye it looked odd. (spoiler: it was mainly because there was so much quick and cheap reconstruction after WWII)

So what did this child notice in Korea? Well people are more likely to touch each other in a friendly way than in England. This surprised me, with my prejudices about how people here would be less outwardly affectionate. You will see a couple of young male friends or female friends holding hands, and at a meal you will see a hand left on a friend or relative's shoulder. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with sexuality, just warmth. I liked it.

Even though it is a modern western economy, it seems to have a lot of non-standard ways of managing things and paying for them. For example, to load the electronic train tickets it seems like you still have to use cash, so you can't just blithely assume it's as cashless as, say, the UK or China. And even though it does not have the great Chinese Firewall, it does block Google Maps' accuracy to protect its local players. But as a positive, I was gobsmacked to see a woman making a call from a *payphone* in a subway station, which is surely a win. Being cutting edge is not the only game in town.

I see that despite its modernity, many traditional skills survive. There are tailors' shops and I even saw a shoeshine stall! I get the impression that despite the number of 'Western' influences, Koreans are still very happy to have their own way of doing things. This seems healthy to me. 

I did enjoy the fact that they still have the old spa/bathhouse tradition, the 'jjimjilbang' still running strongly. I had heard of these before going, and in a previous post wrote about my visits to two of them. They are another example of something that is very embedded in national traditions and the national psyche, just as say, Tai Chi is still really embedded in Chinese society.

One thing I am failing to understand is the relationship between cars and pedestrians. The black and white crossings seem to be purely there for decoration, and when you get a light-controlled crossing it will sometimes take 90 seconds for the countdown to complete. And people in cars seem to expect pedestrians to give way when they reverse out of parking spaces. It's all a bit unfamiliar and I should probably ask how it works. Every country has a system of road use that works, it's just that it's not always the one laid out in their Highway Code.

Another thing which mystified and frustrated me was answered on my last evening by an Englishman who had been living there for a few years. In the morning if I am in a new place I love to go out and find whatever breakfast tradition there is in the place I'm visiting. In France I will go to the cafe and have an 'au lait' with a croissant; in Texas I sought out breakfast burritos; in China the choices are endless and ubiquitous, but in Korea I was hitting a dead end. But my Englishman insider said blithely: "Oh no, Koreans don't really do breakfast". Not do breakfast! The idea of it! But when in Rome. I was however very grateful to step off the ferry to China the day after and run to the first dumpling restaurant.